Category: street art

Dis­cus­sion of gen­er­al­ly illic­it art that is paint­ed on out­door walls, win­dows, doors, etc.

Categories
cinema street art urban

Dirty Hands / Arty documentaries

David Choe - Dirty HandsDavid Choe: Set­ting a good example.


I'm psy­ched to check out Dirty Hands, a new doc­u­men­tary about artist David Choe. I'm usu­al­ly skep­ti­cal about "street art" films, but the trail­er looks pret­ty great, and I've heard that Choe is kind of a mad­man. I com­pare every­thing in this street/art vein to Video Days — which, by the way, did you know that can watch all of Video Days on Google Video? — and I'm always hop­ing that new stuff will some­how advance the form that Spike Jonze laid out all those years ago. Maybe this will? Maybe oth­er stuff has? David Choe - Black Dynamite - watercolorChoe worked some water­col­or mag­ic for a movie called Black Dyna­mite that just made some waves at Sundance.

Categories
flickr music san francisco street art visual

Music / Peggy Honeywell at Mollusk

Flickr photo

Being car-less keeps me (most­ly) around the south­east­ern neigh­bor­hoods of San Fran­cis­co, but every once in a while I'll ven­ture out to the fron­tiers. Last Fri­day, we went out to Mol­lusk, the arty surf shop on 46th-ish Avenue and Irv­ing, (i.e. WAY Out­er Sun­set), for an art open­ing and a per­for­mance by Peg­gy Hon­ey­well, i.e. local art star and beau­ti­ful los­er Clare Rojas. The surf shop set­ting was infor­mal and cozy; the acoustics actu­al­ly weren't bad; there were dogs walk­ing around; all in all, it makes me wish that I got out there more. This inti­mate set­ting was lots bet­ter than the cav­ernous, loud, obnox­ious-peo­ple-filled place I saw her per­form last, Bar­ry McGee's open­ing in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia a cou­ple of years ago.

Categories
new york street art visual

Street art / Swoon

So it seems I'm a cou­ple of years late to this par­tic­u­lar artist, but some recent con­ver­sa­tion on the Book Arts list turned me on to Swoon, a NYC street artist. Her medi­um is the cutout — from paper, wood, linoleum — and she attach­es these to walls all over NYC. The paper ones are the most amaz­ing to me; they're like those snow flakes you make in grade school, but life-sized and real­ly elab­o­rate and of peo­ple. Check out this Flickr clus­ter to get a sense of the way that the paper ages on the wall, and the way that this fragili­ty and sense of imper­ma­nence reacts with the rest of the wall. This inter­view in the Morn­ing News has some good detail about her process:

There's some­thing par­tic­u­lar to the images that make me choose that mate­r­i­al … A lot has to do with the lim­i­ta­tions of the mate­r­i­al. The linoleum you can get so much more detail from. Every­thing that has more nuances, I use linoleum. The wood is rougher, but a good rough­ness. The paper is real­ly hard to think about, and so it tends to be sim­pler. With paper, you'd choose sim­ple sub­jects because it's hard to cre­ate an expres­sion. The chal­lenge is to make the cutout so that it can get on the wall as a sol­id unit in two min­utes or less.

Thanks to how­much­longerkill­menow for the photo.

Categories
street art visual

Missour-ah signage

Flickr photo


I was in Spring­field, Mis­souri for work last week, and I was real­ly sur­prised and impressed with the num­ber of old, unique signs. Over on Flickr, you'll be amazed by two shots of some amaz­ing Glo Laun­dro­mats signs, and a strip mall called "Coun­try Club Plaza" that has an old orange sign with an ana­log clock on it. Good stuff.

Categories
flickr inside art street art visual

Art / LACMA garage RIP

Flickr photo


Soon, the garage out­side the LA Coun­ty Muse­um of Art is get­ting torn down to make way for some big new build­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it's got some real­ly excel­lent murals by Bar­ry McGee and Mar­garet Kil­gallen that I checked out when I was there a cou­ple of sum­mers ago.The LA Week­ly says:

Now's the time to check out the cel­e­bra­tion of street art it has become since Octo­ber 2000, when hus­band and wife team Bar­ry McGee and Mar­garet Kil­gallen were com­mis­sioned to bomb the sec­ond floor of the struc­ture in com­mem­o­ra­tion of the show "Made in California."Over the last five years, Kilgallen's smok­ing, trudg­ing, scowl­ing women and McGee's sig­na­ture sad-sack faces and metic­u­lous­ly drawn mes­sages have inspired unco­erced homages from sev­er­al local­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly known artists: N.Y.-based graf­fi­ti trio FAILE's col­lage sten­cils; Span­ish tag­ger PEZ's bub­bly alien fig­ures, and Obey Giant guru Shep­ard Fairey's loom­ing wheat-paste policeman.

It wouldn't be as sad if Mar­garet K. was still around to bomb anoth­er garage, but the fact that she's not makes the dis­ap­pear­ance of this free and pub­lic place even hard­er to take. Sucks.The whole sto­ry: "Oil on Con­crete".UPDATE: An excel­lent cri­tique of LACMA's deci­sion to tear down the garage, writ­ten by art crit­ic and blog­ger Tyler Green.

Categories
street art visual

Art / Graphic design for public transit

Hong KongTokyoSF MuniParisIf you're like me, one of your favorite parts of see­ing new cities is check­ing out the logo(s) of their pub­lic tran­sit sys­tem. Nowa­days you don't even need to trav­el to these cities to appre­ci­ate their vari­ety; here's a site with an amaz­ing­ly thor­ough cat­a­log.

Categories
street art visual

Art / Palestine: "The ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers"

Palestinian wall - 1
Banksy wall - 2

The British street artist Banksy just paint­ed nine provoca­tive murals on the wall that sep­a­rates the West Bank from Israel. The sar­don­ic quote in the title is Banksy's reflec­tion on his work there. He goes into a lit­tle more detail on his site. The Guardian and BBC both cov­ered it, and there is at least a lit­tle dis­agree­ment over the mean­ing and rel­e­vance of polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed street art here and here.While we're on the sub­ject of Banksy, here's my pre­vi­ous favorite project of his. As the BBC sub-head describes it, "Fake pre­his­toric rock art of a cave­man with a shop­ping trol­ley has been hung on the walls of the British Museum."